Building a message board with a web interface

[Sergio] is just getting into hardware hacking. He started by getting an HD44780 compatible LCD screen running with his Arduino. To take the project to the next level, he decided to add a web interface for changing the message displayed on the LCD.

He’s doing things on the cheap (a man after our own hearts), purchasing many of his components off of eBay. Unfortunately that decision came back to bite him when it was time to connect his Arduino to the network. The Ethernet Shield knock-off wasn’t the same as the official version. That one’s got a Wiznet W5100 ethernet chip with does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. Instead, [Sergio] is using a board with an ENC28J60. It took a bit of searching, but eventually he came up with an example to help him get his Arduino serving web pages and listening for updates from them.

The ENC28J60 is actually not a bad piece of hardware. It’s cheap enough, and there are a few hardware/software demos out there that are worth taking a look at.

10 thoughts on “Building a message board with a web interface”

I can tell from experience the ENC28J60 has a few… let’s call them ‘interesting features’. An example: the device sports ethernet cable polarity autodetection… but when you happen to have the polarity wrong, it drops packets like no tomorrow. If you decide on using them, you may want to check out the errata-section of the datasheet first.

This kind of thing has been done quite a few times on the internet. I remember using this (http://tuxgraphics.org/electronics/200702/article07021.shtml ) a long time ago and there seems to be no problem with the amount of memory. It should work on your hardware.
I also found the web interface from dangerousprototypes to be well featured at a good price, so you might like that for a more powerful and budget solution.

tried using this kind of ethernet chip (ENC28J60). I gave up as my goal was not spend 90% of my time figuring out why the ethernet did not work. One guy on the arduino forum started to write a driver which would provide exactly the same type of feature as the standard ethernet library but for the enc28j60 chip. I don’t think he’s done yet (it is not working for me) but you can get his driver and give it a try there: